We’ve recently looked at the face and hands of Jesus; last night, Dave preached on the heart of Jesus, looking at the feeding of the five thousand in Matt 14:13-21.

Jesus, at this point in His ministry, wanted to be alone. He had just learnt of the death of His cousin, John the Baptist. He was sorrowful and grieving and wanted time out to pray. But the crowds followed Him and His response to their need was that His heart was moved with compassion for them.

So often when we are interrupted or our plans are changed, we become bitter or resentful towards those who crowd in on us. But Jesus, even in His own grief, had compassion for others.

The heart of Jesus was:
(1) compassionate
(2) practical
(3) obedient
(4) loving

Being moved with compassion led Jesus to action – He set about inviting His disciples to meet the practical needs of the crowd and organised the feeding of the five thousand with just five loaves and two fish. He was obedient to the Father’s will, always choosing to do what He saw His Father doing. He acted always from love.

The heart of Jesus is always to involve others in meeting needs. He involved His disciples in this great miracle: everyone was involved in distributing the bread and the fish. He supplied the miracle, but He gave others the opportunity to serve. Similarly, today, He gives us the opportunity of serving Him. We don’t do this on our own and we don’t have to meet every need that exists, but for those who would have hearts like Jesus, there will always be the opportunity to serve others, for that kind of services lies at the heart of Jesus.

We also had a birthday to celebrate!

This is What We Believe (Aaron Shust)
You are the Christ (Matt 16:16), Anointed One (Acts 4:27),
Light of the world (John 8:12), God’s only Son (John 3:16),
In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1)
Emmanuel has come to live with us (Matthew 1:23)

Truly this man is the Son, the Son of God (Mark 15:39)
Who takes away the sins of the world
This man is the Lamb, the Lamb of God
Who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29)
And this is what we believe

You are the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6)
You came to change our wrongs to right (Matt 1:21)
In the beginning was the Word (John 1:1)
And we will sing of what we’ve seen and heard (Acts 4:20, 1 John 1:3)

And we believe that You are God (John 6:69)
Born to set Your people free (Matt 1:21, Gal 5:1)
Became the final sacrifice (Heb 9:28)
Conquered death to bring us life (2 Tim 1:9-10)
And we believe that You are God
Born to set Your people free
Became the final sacrifice
You conquered death to bring us life

Truly this man is the Son, the Son of God
Who takes away the sins of the world
This man is the Lamb, the Lamb of God
Who takes away the sins of the world
Sing praise to the Son, the Son of God
Who takes away the sins of the world
All praise to the Lamb, the Lamb of God
Who takes away the sins of the world
And this is what we believe

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbjzBZy-huE&feature=related

What we believe is crucially important to how we live. To a very large extent, what we believe actually shapes how we live. We are not always conscious of our beliefs: sometimes, they are ingrained in us and are at a subconscious level. But for Christians, it’s especially important not only to believe – for faith is absolutely crucial to becoming a Christian and living the Christian life, as Paul teaches us in the book of Galatians especially – but to know what we believe and who we believe.

2 Timothy 4:1-5 looks at Paul’s instructions to Timothy about what to teach and how to live in an age when ‘itching ears’ will not want to put up with ‘sound doctrine’. ‘Sound doctrine’ means the set of beliefs by which we live; ‘sound’ indicates wholeness, wellness, goodness and purity. Paul is Timothy’s role model, urging him to imitate his lifestyle and continue teaching all he has learnt from him:
“What you heard from me, keep as the pattern of sound teaching, with faith and love in Christ Jesus. Guard the good deposit that was entrusted to you—guard it with the help of the Holy Spirit who lives in us.” (2 Tim 1:13-14)

In the church, each generation has a responsibility to ‘pass the baton on’ to the next generation. We need to teach others ‘sound doctrine’; we need to pass on what we have seen and heard, as John says:
“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” (1 John 1:1)

We also need to ‘correctly handle the word of truth’ (2 Tim 2:15), cutting the word straight and evenly so that we do not take things out of context or misinterpret what the Bible has to teach us. We need to understand that faith and belief go hand in hand. It’s no use simply collecting ‘facts’ or head knowledge; these must be translated into living faith. Sound doctrine must always lead to sound behaviour.

The Bible has many types of language with which to instruct us. There’s the language of command: ‘do this,’ ‘don’t do that’. There is the language of the gospel, the ‘good news’. But there is also the language of encouragement, for the Holy Spirit is the Comforter or Encourager, there to give “comfort or encouragement or discernment in the muddled details of dailiness.” (Gerhard von Rad, quoted by Eugene Peterson, ‘Practise Resurrection’ P 173). We need God’s guidance in everyday living, not just in crisis moments.

What we believe is not something to be relegated to dusty tomes of theology. It’s the heartbeat of everyday life!

Bible studies resumed this week, looking at Romans 10:1-13.

Paul continues with his heartfelt desire and prayer that the Israelites should be saved. Despite being known as the apostle to the Gentiles and being called to serve God overseas, he still has a heart for his people. He is well aware of their zeal – how could he not, being a prime example of that himself before he came to know Christ?!- but he knows that that zeal is not based on true knowledge (Romans 10:2). This is always a danger for us: zeal (often known as fanatacism these days) is not enough. We need to know the truth (which sets us free) and we need love also, for knowledge on its own is also not enough (1 Cor 8:1).

Zeal based on our own righteousness is a dangerous thing (Rom 10:3-4). When we refuse the righteousness offered us in Christ, preferring our own righteousness, we are in a difficult position. It’s so tempting to think that salvation can be earned, that the cleanness of our hands will bring us God’s favour. And, as Paul reminds us from Deuteronomy 30, in theory simple obedience to the law is all that is required. For sinful men, however, our hearts do not yield to the Lord and we end up unable to earn our own righteousness. We must neither denigrate the work Christ has already done or try to achieve our own salvation; instead we must simply believe and confess Christ as Lord. The gospel really is simple enough for a child to grasp: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” (Rom 10:13) Yet, as Paul has said in Romans 9, the very simplicity of the gospel cuts at our self-sufficiency and leaves us asking, “Is that it? Is that all I have to do? It’s too good to be true!”

Believing in Christ may sound simple, but it remains true that that simple step of faith leads to a radical reversal and a new submission. Believing in our hearts changes us. There has to be outward, visible change – ‘fruit’, as Jesus put it. How we speak, how we live, how we act will all change as a result of our faith. We will have a new focus, a new way of living, a new life.

Mark continued looking at the body of Jesus last night, this time looking at the hands of Jesus. How did Jesus use His hands?

First and foremost, Jesus worked with His hands. Mark 6:1-3 tells us that He worked as a carpenter for the majority of His life. He was a working man, used to manual labour – and as such, His hands would reflect that. He was an example of servanthood, washing His disciples’ feet with His hands (John 13:1-5). He showed us that we too should be workers and servants, not afraid to get involved.

Jesus did many miracles with His hands, such as the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5:35-42), where touching a dead body to bring life shows us the radical nature of how He worked. He was prepared to touch the untouchable to bring life. He healed a deaf and mute man (Mark 7:31-35) by spitting and touching his tongue and ears and healed a blind man (John 9:1-7) in similar fashion, spitting on the ground, making mud and putting it on the man’s eyes. Clearly He had no need to do use His hands to heal, but He did so to inspire faith.

In Matt 14:15-21, Jesus fed the five thousand by taking the bread, giving thanks and breaking it. He was not held back by a fear of failure, using unconventional means at times to bring healing and provision. We too need to be bold in our faith, for the fear of man can bring a snare.

Jesus’s hands also bore the scars of the Crucifixion, a sign of how much He loved us in that He was willing to bear such pain for us. John 20:24-29 shows us how those scars were still visible after the Resurrection. The greatest miracle we see is that of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Now we are the hands of Jesus on earth. Let’s work as He did and serve a world which can only see Jesus through us.

We also had a birthday to celebrate!

The parable of the Lost Son (Luke 15:11-32) ought really to be called ‘the parable of the two sons and a father’. Dave preached from this passage this morning, looking at it as a drama in two acts, a parable Jesus told because his audience had been complaining that he associated with sinners.

In the first act, we see how the younger son goes off the rails, insulting his father by asking for his inheritance even before the father has died. The father, patiently enduring a loss of honour and respect, not to mention the pain of rejected, unrequited love, allows his son to go off, squandering his wealth in wild living. In Scene 2, we see this son, ending up in the poverty of the pig-sty, finally returning home in Scene 3, to find his father not only welcoming him home, but lavishing extravagant love and gifts on him. If by ‘prodigal’ we mean ‘recklessly extravagant’, then this adjective applies as much to the father as the son!

But the story does not end here. In Act 2, we see the reactions of the older son, a type, perhaps, of the scribes and Pharisees – the ones who didn’t break the law, but who were yet filled with their own righteousness and pride and were just as far from the Father as the more disreputable ‘sinners’ they despised. The older son, on hearing the commotion caused by his brother’s return, is absolutely furious. He will not join in the celebrations, snubbing his father by remaining outside. The father, however, loves both his sons and tries to reason with him – to no avail. The older son feels unjustly treated. He has been outwardly obedient all his life, but despite appearing to be a paragon of virtue, working hard and being self-disciplined, he does not really have a heart for his father. He has been trying to earn his way to righteousness and has ended up refusing the offer of grace.

The outrage that Jesus’s audience would have felt on hearing this parable is often glossed over. The ‘bad’ son, the ‘sinner’, has entered into his father’s salvation, but the ‘good’ son, who has obeyed the rules not out of relationship but to get things for himself, is left outside. The man of moral rectitude, at this point, is still lost.

It has cost the Father a great deal – the death of His only begotten Son – to purchase our salvation. Are we going to embrace this ‘outrageous grace’ and enter in or are we going to remain on the outside, trying to earn our own salvation through our own righteousness?